Following up on Sunday’s post, our old friends at Frogdice wanted to mention that they also have a fantasy-themed match-3 game called Tower of Elements. It is a tower defense game, a genre of which I am a fan.
I have played the demo but am not tempting myself with a new tower defense game just before a conference. I’m not sure how well it clicks in the first ten levels. It’s match-3 gameplay. I’d look at how that varies in the late game, but after you beat the tutorial you don’t get the option of seeing anything except the credits, so I can’t see what I’m missing by not buying. You need to match tiles in the right row to attack the enemy, which is rather particular for small monsters like rats. It seemed to go well with the strategy of “spam matches at the bottom of the tower, and other matches up top will just happen.” Vertical matches were more useful for covering ground, but I imagine the later levels have enemies who need many hits and who might care about what element you use to attack.
Tile drops happen instantly, and I never realized how satisfying it was to have the next row of tiles fall into place until I did not have it. You know that moment when you get a big chain and tiles just keep falling into place? Thunk, next, thunk, next, thunk. Of course, you might really hate that if you were waiting on the chain to get your next fireball going. Instead, you get huge waves of those fireballs when you do set off a big chain, which is satisfying in a different way. Either the demo is rigged or it is really easy to get chains with five tile colors.
“Click on the gold in the next few seconds or you lose your treasure” is a game mechanic pet peeve of mine, but the items you could buy with gold seemed unimportant when you could spam walls of fireballs. I never used an item outside the tutorial, but they are one of the mechanics to deal with “there’s a rat on the bottom row and I don’t have 3 to match down there.”
The art and sound are not carrying much of the weight. It is not adding much or causing a distraction. It is not appealing to nostalgia with pixelated art, which I appreciate considering how many small publishers are doing that lately.
Frogdice also wanted to offer a 50% off code: CFXR000QV
: ZUbon
Thanks tons for posting this.
If anyone has questions about the game (either the development process, using Unity3d, the game itself, whatever) please feel free to post. I’ll do my best to answer.
I would love to hear feedback about the game.
It is our first downloadable, offline game so it is totally new ground for us.
Thanks again,